Perhaps the most significant development on the Internet in recent years has been the rapid proliferation of online social networks, such as LinkedIn® and Facebook®. Billions of users are presently accessing such social networks to connect with friends and acquaintances and to share personal and professional information. Each member in an online social network typically maintains a profile page, which contains various information about the member, such as the member's interests, marital status, employer and school affiliations.
While organizing this profile information, it is useful to be able to associate members with specific entities, such as the company for which a member works, or a club to which a member belongs. Unfortunately, this entity information typically appears as free text strings in the member records, and because of spelling variations for entity names, it can be hard to associate these text strings with specific entities. For example, it may be hard to determine whether the text string “Acme Corporation” and the text string “Acme, Inc.” actually refer to the same company. Also, the same entity name in different member records may refer to different organizations. For example, the entity name “Alice's Restaurant” may refer to a restaurant in Woodside, Calif., or a different restaurant with the same name in Jefferson, N.J.
Hence, it can be challenging to identify entities associated with free text strings in member records.